[DEMO] Monolith

[AlexMdle]

Hi. After a few years of work and some deliberation, I've decided to try and brave this section for some feedback on a game me and a few buddies are making, called Monolith.
It's a hybrid twin-stick shmup that, at first, resembles the likes of Binding of Isaac/Gungeon but the controls are probably more familiar to people who know their Fraxy. The player ship is small, agile, can dash, bomb and use a large variety of weapons with an even larger variety of modifiers.

Here's a small (slightly-outdated) trailer I've cobbled a few months ago:
Greenlight Trailer

If you like what you see, consider giving the demo a try:
Demo

Any feedback and suggestions are appreciated.

[BulletMagnet]

I tried the demo for this a little ways back and had a good time with it; my itch.io feed said there was some sorta change in the past few days, was it updated recently? Will give it another go either way in order to provide feedback.

[AlexMdle]

Yeah, we released the final demo build on wednesday, it's not too big of an update, but importantly does fix a few obscure game-breaking bugs we found since the last one.

[Cristian_CL]

I spent about an hour with the demo, I used keyboard+mouse, it's a pretty well crafted game and I don't have any serious complain, I wish you the best success.

There is one thing that bothered me and I'm not entirely sure if it was my fault or not, I tried to test it for a while but I couldn't get into a similar situation again, so I couldn't check properly: when you enter a new room, things inside are drawn gradually, and you can start moving before the room is entirely drawn, I THINK; at one instance, there was an obstacle (a candle or a flame, I don't remember exactly) very close to the entrance, and I think I got damaged by it before it was visible since I moved too soon. I insist, this was probably my fault but I'm not 100% sure, maybe you could check the time it takes to draw the entire room or the time the game doesn't let you move while the room is still not drawn entirely.

One thing that I find annoying but is just a thing of personal taste is that some of the weapons have too much of a cooldown, so it is easy to get cornered. However, that shouldn't be a problem after the first time you use that weapon and know how it works.

I really like the weapon that can be charged by holding the shoot button but can still be shot pretty fast by tapping it.

The difficulty is just right.

[tate]

Really enjoying the well-done pixel art. Kudos for actually generating different sprites for the player ship, rather than using Flash-type rotation.

I also like the decision to use a square arena – something I understand that Vlambeer wanted to do with Nuclear Throne. So, it strikes me as a bit odd that there doesn’t appear to be a tate (portrait) mode. I haven’t seen any indication that there is any useful information outside of the 240 x 290 (at 1X) arena + UI, apart from the cursor being allowed outside of it. FWIW, I did manage to force the game into psudo-tate by using windowed mode with auto resolution on a 1024 x 1280 screen, with only the loss of a bit of width. Had to do so, as going into fullscreen resulted in the screen blanking out – the same as in Downwell; possibly germane as I believe both games were developed in GMS.

[AlexMdle]

Don't think I'll be able to implement TATE, at least not immediately, the old codebase just won't support it without some massive rewrites.

Edit: Theoretically I can add an option invert the width/height resolution values if that offers any kind of solution. There's also an AUTO resolution setting, which might work with a flipped display. Gonna test that.

[tate]

Theoretically I can add an option invert the width/height resolution values if that offers any kind of solution. There's also an AUTO resolution setting, which might work with a flipped display. Gonna test that.

Much appreciated. If I'm understanding what you mean by inverting, would the arena + UI end up with borders on all four sides? That would work if you have monitor that allows zooming, but they're fairly rare.

The auto resolution setting actually works when my system is in portrait mode, but it scales the height (290 pixels at 1X), which happens to more or less work with a 4:5 display, but probably no other aspect ratio. The question is whether you can eliminate the pillarboxing in tate mode, as Downwell does. Then, get the auto resolution to scale by width (240 pixels at 1X).

As a side note, I've managed to get the exact same arena/enemy configuration twice in a row a few times. Is that something you can trap for?

[AlexMdle]

I'm gonna have to see if I can work it out. Also nah, that's normal. The room layouts are handmade, there's about 400+ of them per floor atm.

[AlexMdle]

Theoretically I can add an option invert the width/height resolution values if that offers any kind of solution. There's also an AUTO resolution setting, which might work with a flipped display. Gonna test that.

Much appreciated. If I'm understanding what you mean by inverting, would the arena + UI end up with borders on all four sides? That would work if you have monitor that allows zooming, but they're fairly rare.

The auto resolution setting actually works when my system is in portrait mode, but it scales the height (290 pixels at 1X), which happens to more or less work with a 4:5 display, but probably no other aspect ratio. The question is whether you can eliminate the pillarboxing in tate mode, as Downwell does. Then, get the auto resolution to scale by width (240 pixels at 1X).

As a side note, I've managed to get the exact same arena/enemy configuration twice in a row a few times. Is that something you can trap for?

Ok, it was kind of a nightmare, but TATE mode is in.

[BulletMagnet]

This thing's been out on Steam for a bit now, and I'm having a pretty grand time with it; I strongly urge folks who haven't to at least give the demo a go, projects like this deserve support, especially from communities like ours.

[Shepardus]

I didn't realize this had a thread on the forum, I saw it on Steam though and it looked interesting. I haven't gotten around to checking it out but it's on my wishlist.

Is it in any other store besides Steam?

[Fat Pug Studio]

I see you're already having a great success with the game, gg!

[z0mbie90]

Bought it on Steam yesterday. Having a fun time with it so far.

[BulletMagnet]

The game recently got an update which adds a hunk of new stuff; moreover, it's 20% off for the next few days. If you haven't yet demoed this to see if it's up your alley, now's a good time to get around to it.

[BulletMagnet]

If you act quick it's currently five bucks on Chrono.gg.

[BulletMagnet]

Now available DRM-free on itch.io.